Is Huck still running for '08 bid, or '12?

Mike Huckabee is technically still running for president, but increasingly his bid is aimed at strengthening his public profile for the next stage in his career.

Within the campaign, there’s a degree of optimism about his chances of preventing John McCain from garnering the 1,191 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination. But Huckabee’s supporters are also now embracing what they see as his enhanced future prospects.

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As they see it, the relative success of his longshot bid — as well as his finish as the unquestioned second-to-last man standing — will grant the former Arkansas governor a visible platform and put him at the top of the candidate list should he choose to run again in 2012 or 2016.

“At end of day, we’ll do whatever we can to help John McCain in the fall,” said Huckabee strategist Ed Rollins. “If he wins, great. If not, the game starts all over again.”

And even if McCain does win in November, Rollins noted that the Arizonan will already be 72 years old.

“It may be open again in four years. And Mike is 51. He’s got a long way to go before his political career is over.”

Former Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), a top Huckabee ally and frequent surrogate, is not giving up hope on this year. But he also suggested that surviving well into the primary season would make this cycle’s darkhorse a front-runner for the next time around the track.

“The Republican Party has been kind to second-place finishes in the past,” Hutchinson said. “He’s a young man. And he’s run the kind of race that has not burned bridges or torn apart the party.”

As McCain’s success has underscored, the GOP has its own tradition of political primogeniture: rewarding he who is next in line for the party’s nomination. Dating back to Ronald Reagan’s 1976 challenge of Gerald Ford — a race that Huckabee now frequently cites — that candidate has typically been somebody who has run and fallen short in the past.

“Huckabee is playing for second,” said Republican strategist Craig Shirley, a McCain backer and author of a book on the 1976 presidential race. “He wants the story written that he came in second to McCain and not Mitt Romney. That way he will have what he believes is the more legitimate claim to be the heir apparent for the GOP nomination, and not Romney, in 2012 or 2016.”

In effect, Huckabee’s continued campaign is as much about early jockeying for the next GOP contest as it is a last-ditch effort at this one.

“In the long term, staying in will help him more than it will hurt him,” argued Joe Carter, an aide at the Family Research Council who briefly worked for Huckabee last year.

To the casual voter in states that are just now holding contests, the former governor and Baptist preacher is just now making his public debut and, in a two-man race, garnering the sort of valuable exposure that he wouldn’t receive had he dropped out.

Carter, a native Texan, noted that he had friends from back home who were just now tuning into the state’s March 4 primary and asking him how to get a yard sign. “You don’t want to discourage that and say it’s too late,” he said.

Still, Carter acknowledged that Huckabee has to be mindful about the point at which he wears out his welcome with the party rank-and-file by remaining in a race he can’t win.

“It’s a balancing act,” Carter said, predicting that Huckabee will take his cue from the results in Texas.

Rollins acknowledged that the Lone Star State, where Huckabee once lived and where he’s spent considerable time raising cash and preaching in friendly churches, could be determinative. “If he doesn’t do well there, it’s kind of a long march,” Rollins said. “Texas is really where we’re going to focus on.”